![]() #TYRANNY OF THE MINORITY TV#In 1987, for example, Republican appointees eliminated the rule that required radio and TV stations to air a range of political views. #TYRANNY OF THE MINORITY FREE#They have advanced policies to weaken the electorate economically, to undermine a free and fair news media, and to withhold the education and informed discussion that would equip citizens for active engagement. Subtler yet no less effective have been their efforts to attack democracy at the root. #TYRANNY OF THE MINORITY FULL#Republicans’ furious and nasty war against full participation has taken many forms: gerrymandering, limiting early voting, reducing the number of polling places, restricting third-party voter registration, and otherwise disenfranchising significant portions of the electorate. Trump, meanwhile, has openly gloated over the number of black people who didn’t vote in 2016. “Maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” Bannon replied. His interlocutor noted that such a move would exclude a lot of African Americans. Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s chief strategist and adviser, once “mused about the desirability of limiting the vote to property owners,” according to the New York Times. Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire who was an early supporter of Donald Trump, has deplored the effects of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, because women tend to vote in favor of social programs. They have not been particularly secretive about their goals. And where Democrats have been wavering and inconsistent in their desire to expand democratic participation, Republicans have been firmly committed to limiting it: rather than attempting to win the votes of people of color, they attempt to prevent people of color from voting. In wooing white voters, Republicans rejected - indeed, ejected - non-white constituencies, who found their only and imperfect home with the Democrats. Writing in The New Republic, the journalist Jeet Heer explains that Buckley’s fledgling conservative movement recognized that by persuading disgruntled whites across the country to vote according to their racial and ideological rather than economic interests, it could gain “reliable foot soldiers” in its larger project of undermining the left. Even as the civil-rights movement and the Voting Rights Act sought to undo Jim Crow, a new, stealthier Jim Crow arose in its place. “For the time being, it is the advanced race.” On the basis of that “advanced” status, Buckley decided, a decision to wrest control from the majority “may be, though undemocratic, enlightened.” At its most ideological, the withdrawal from the democratic experiment has served white supremacy at its least, it has been a scramble for power by any means necessary. “The White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically,” Buckley wrote in 1957. Justification for the approach had been offered years earlier by William F. The Republicans, meanwhile, won the South with the Southern Strategy, that euphemistically named program to gain the support of white Southerners by stoking their racial fears. Lyndon Johnson led the Democrats toward stronger alliances with people of color and with women. The dismantling started in the 1960s, when the two main parties reversed positions on civil rights. The roof begins to fall in whole rooms are torn down, the wreckage is carted away eventually, all that remains is a skeleton.ĭemocracy, as the historian Sean Wilentz wrote, depends on “the many” - on the power of ordinary people “not simply to select their governors but to oversee the institutions of government, as officeholders and as citizens free to assemble and criticize those in office.” In its eagerness to return the house to its original size, the Republican Party eventually began to dismantle the edifice itself, overriding any efforts to make it more spacious and secure. After many such small thefts, the structure weakens. Imagine then that someone stole a shingle, or a nail - first one, then another. Over the next two centuries, various groups struggled to make it bigger, with space for people of other faiths or no faith, people of color, poor people, and women. Think of our democracy as a house we built in 1776, big enough only for Christian, property-owning white men. ![]()
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